The Internet may be used for many forms of communication, including voice conversations, video conferencing, development collaboration, and the like. In order for a manufacturers' programs, applications, equipment, and systems to be interoperable with each other, many protocols have been developed to standardize the communication between such systems. These protocols have grown increasingly complex to handle all the types of traffic generated to facilitate communication for video conferencing, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and data over Internet Protocol applications. Two examples of such protocols that have been defined for handling the administration of VoIP, and its natural extension to multimedia communication are H.323 from the International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Both H.323 and SIP typically allow for multimedia communication including voice, video, and data communications in real-time.
H.323 and SIP, in addition to other such communication protocols, each rely on multiple other protocols, some of which may in turn rely on UDP for sending and receiving multimedia traffic. UDP features minimal overhead compared to other transport protocols (most notably TCP) at the expense of having less reliability. UDP does not provide for guaranteed packet delivery nor data integrity. UDP does offer the highest possible throughput, thus, making it ideally suited for multimedia real-time communications.
While these different protocols, such as H.323 and SIP, each facilitate the multimedia communication, they are quite different in structure and format. Some protocols, such as H.323, are binary format protocols. That means the transmitted information in the H.323 stream is in a binary coded format. In contrast, other protocols, such as SIP, are text-based protocols, which means that text tags or other information are included in the transmitted streams. Multimedia communication systems, therefore, are typically designed to be implemented in one of the various protocols. For example, one communication system may be designed to operate with H.323, while others might be designed to operate with SIP, VoIP, or the like.
A problem arises when a party using an H.323 endpoint on one communication system designed to use H.323 desires to communicate with another party using a different protocol endpoint on another communication system designed for the different protocol. Because the two systems and endpoints use incompatible protocols, communication cannot be established between the two parties by connecting the first endpoint and system with the target endpoint and system. The two endpoints and systems speak different languages and, thus, cannot understand the messaging and data being transmitted by the other. As the popularity of Internet-based or electronic multimedia communications grows, a likelihood exists that this problem may be encountered with increasing frequency.